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Changelog

Notable changes to ByteAsk. Update your CLI any time with byteask --update.

0.1.12​

Released 8 September 2026.

Engine rebuilt from byteask-engine dd728f895c, on all four platforms.

Your transcript stays yours. /usage, /referral-code, /upgrade and /voucher used to print into your terminal's real scrollback, so checking your quota wedged a dashboard permanently into your conversation. They are panes now, like /model - esc closes them and leaves the transcript exactly as it was. enter never closes a pane; it only does what the footer says. The operator announcement banner is gone for the same reason.

/usage tells you more, and tells the truth. Meters are twice the resolution and show when each window resets, and credit is a named row. Plan pricing used to read "$20/month", which was wrong - we sell a one-time 30-day pass, and the pane now says so: one payment for 30 days, no auto-renew, your plan switches as soon as payment completes.

You will stop being logged out. Sessions lasted 30 days and nothing renewed them; when yours expired the client kept sending the dead credential, and /login could appear to succeed while the new credential silently failed to save. Your session now renews itself quietly at launch, and anyone already expired is healed on their next launch with no email round-trip.

Errors say what happened, immediately. Every unexpected response used to be treated as temporary, so a "please sign in" or a plan limit spun Reconnecting... and was then replaced by a generic retry error. Only genuine server errors and rate limits retry now.

Models. The picker shows 20, up from 18, with nine new. auto is a chain across three models and two providers rather than one fixed choice, so if one is having a bad day your turn quietly lands on the next - and its first choice got five times cheaper. Anthropic models are currently out of service and hidden.

Accessibility. A screen-reader mode renders panes as linear, announce-once text and substitutes a plain symbol set on non-UTF-8 terminals. Enable with --ax-screen-reader, BYTEASK_AX_SCREEN_READER, or tui.screen_reader.

From upstream (about 2,000 commits): /recap summarizes on demand; /cd and /pwd change and show the working directory mid-conversation; /agents opens a session command center; byteask queue sends a message into a running session from another terminal; dropped connections reconnect themselves; /keymap can genuinely rebind keys including two-key chords; links in model output are clickable; vim mode gained undo, redo, dot-repeat and search motions.

Two changes to read before updating:

  • An auto-reviewer can now approve some risky actions without asking, and it is on by default. The permission menu offers an explicit choice between "Approve for me" and "Ask for approval"; choose the latter to be asked about everything.
  • byteask exec --full-auto has been removed. It warned in 0.1.11; it is now an error. Use --sandbox workspace-write. Scripts still passing it will fail.

Known issues:

  • Upgrading is currently failing. Our payment provider began requiring a contact number we do not collect. Everything else works normally - email [email protected] and we will sort your plan out directly.
  • The update prompt still blocks startup with a yes/no question.

0.1.11​

Released 30 July 2026.

Engine rebuilt from byteask-engine a00d4ea008 (13 commits since v0.1.10's 343a6fb68e).

Highlights:

  • Operator alerts rendered at the top of the session.
  • /login rebuilt as a native bottom-pane settings surface.
  • byteask exec now renders extension tool calls (cpp_*/ref_*) - previously invisible.
  • cpp-tools: real sanitizer output, project builds, bounded execution, trust gate.
  • Hardware-aware performance verification.
  • "Codex" scrubbed from remaining user-facing strings; byteask --update routing.

0.1.10​

Released 23 July 2026.

Cloud provider presets.

  • Add a cloud provider by name, not URL. byteask models add <alias> --provider openrouter --key sk-... connects OpenRouter, Groq, Together, DeepSeek, Mistral, xAI, Cerebras, or Fireworks with just your own key - no endpoint URL to look up. Run byteask models providers to see the list. The model routes as self/<alias>, direct from your machine under your key. Your key, your account: the provider bills you (ByteAsk never sees or meters the traffic). See Self-Hosted Models → Cloud providers.

0.1.9​

Released 18 July 2026.

Self-hosted models + security hardening.

  • Self-hosted models (self/*). Point ByteAsk at your own OpenAI-compatible model server - vLLM, TGI, SGLang, Ollama, LM Studio, llama.cpp, a DGX box, or a LiteLLM proxy - and use it in /model like a cloud model. Register with byteask models add <alias> --url ..., and it appears as self/<alias>. Prompts go directly from your machine to your server: your compute, never metered, never routed through ByteAsk. ByteAsk auto-detects your server's wire protocol (pass-through when it speaks the Responses API, translate when it speaks Chat Completions) and byteask models test gives you a plain-English capability check. See Self-Hosted Models.
  • Account security hardening. Stronger anti-abuse across sign-in and rewards: disposable/throwaway email detection, .ac.in domain policy, and Sybil-resistance on the referral and credit system.

0.1.8​

Released 15 July 2026.

Visible tool cells and a better referral program.

  • Every tool call is now a visible cell in the TUI. C/C++ tools (cpp_godbolt, debug, …) and reference tools (autosar_ref, …) each render their own cell showing the tool, its arguments, and its output - inline in the conversation. Nothing the agent runs is hidden.
  • Referrals now reward both sides. When someone installs with your code and signs up, you both get $10 of usage credit (previously only the referrer earned).
  • Refer 3 friends → your first month of Pro is free. /referral-code shows your live progress toward the reward.

0.1.7​

Released 15 July 2026.

Grounded reference tools and debugger tool renames.

  • Reference tools (*_ref). Seven grounded reference tools for hardware and safety-critical engineering: autosar_ref (AUTOSAR/MISRA/ISO C++), mcu_ref (STM32, Cortex-M, Modbus, CAN), fpga_ref (Xilinx/AMD, AXI), hft_ref (ITCH/OUCH/FIX, TCP/IP, PTP), grid_ref (IEEE 1547/2030.5, SunSpec), scpi_ref (instrument manuals), and x86_ref (the x86-64 SDM). Each returns verbatim excerpts with a citation, or says "no confident match" instead of guessing.
  • Debugger tools renamed. cpp_debug → debug, cpp_debug_session → debug_session, cpp_debug_attach → debug_attach, and cpp_record → debug_record. Dropping the cpp_ prefix reflects that they debug any native binary (including Rust), not just C/C++.

For the current feature set, see Features. For install and update instructions, see the Overview.